Texas State U.-San Marcos: COLUMN: Texas State U.'s attempt to revamp image long overdue.

(From University Wire)

Byline: Sean Wardwell

Texas State Unviersity fills all the semantic requirements of a university. There are classes and students. There's an athletics program that keeps getting stronger, even if we lose a few games. If you look around this place, it seems to be an honest-to-God college. Yet there's something missing and I can't place my finger on it. Sometimes it feels like we aren't trying hard enough to build our own distinctive identity and at other times it seems we are trying too hard.

What is Texas State? This school has sat on this hill for more than 100 years and it still seems like we are struggling to find an identity. One step in that process is celebrating our past. Recently, a statue of Lyndon B. Johnson as a student has been set up outside Flowers Hall. I'm glad it's there, too. We should be proud that we are the only Texas university to graduate a president. We should be proud that George Strait got his start here. Hell, being an avid sci-fi geek, I take pride that we graduated Tracy Scroggins who played Capt. Lochley on Babylon 5. We are still the Southland Conference champions. There's a lot to be proud of.

But it isn't enough, is it? Texas State has an unearned past that continues to haunt us. For many people, we are and will continue to be the party school. No matter what we do, we just can't seem to live that one down. It does not even seem to matter that the reason we were named as a party school is fictitious. Playboy magazine never rated us and even if the magazine did, it was 30 years ago.

Yet the school and the town keep wanting to kill something that was never really alive in the first place. Every time they talk about getting rid of the party school image, they just put it back on life support. That's the problem with the party school tag; we keep bringing it up and we won't let it die like it needs to. We are overreacting and we keep overreacting under the delusion that it does the student body good.

But now we have a nice shiny ...